A Subtly Satrirical Study Of The Religious Rights From The Author Of Little Children

All adolescents have sex lives. The only question is whether they're confined to the imagination. This is a very real truth that many people conveniently seem to forget when they become parents and cannot fathom the idea that their offspring could ever thrum with the same hormonally insistent obsessions they themselves once did.

Despite its title, The Abstinence Teacher, the new novel by the sturdily entertaining Tom Perrotta, is not really about kids having sex, or even not having sex. It's a subtly satirical study of religious fanaticism that finds Perrotta back in the upper-middle-class Northeastern suburbs he plumbed in what is still his best novel to date, Little Children, and also in the bureaucratic mess of public-school systems he explored in Election.

Ruth Ramsey is a happily divorced middle-aged mother of two who teaches high school health. Having made the grievous error of suggesting, to a grossed-out student, that some people do indeed enjoy oral sex, Ruth finds herself on the wrong side of a new curriculum initiative called Wise Choices for Teens. This is a euphemism for abstinence-based sex ed - consisting of, as Ruth sees it, "shameless fear-mongering, backed up by half-truths and bogus examples and inflammatory rhetoric."

The painstakingly made-up face of Wise Choices is an attractive, 28-year-old, self-proclaimed virgin-by-choice; after her first anti-sex presentation to the students, Ruth marvels that the woman "had somehow pulled off the neat feat of seeming sexy and puritanical at the same time, of impersonating a feminist while articulating a set of ideas that would have seemed retro in 1954, of making abstinence seem steamy and adventurous, a right-wing American variation on Tantric sex."

Not coincidentally, while Ruth is being slapped on the wrist for her more liberal views - she's forced to teach a class that presents as absolute truth, for example, that condoms have a 32 percent failure rate - a small congregation called the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth is gaining considerable traction in the community. One of its most ardent members is Tim Mason, who recently has discovered that Jesus provides the only fulfilling substitute for the lifetime of drug and alcohol addiction that destroyed his marriage. Tim also happens to be the soccer coach of Ruth's younger daughter.

When Tim is introduced, it seems like the novel is going to veer in the direction of an opposites-attract romance, M-` la the adulterous parents of Little Children, in which he and Ruth learn valuable lessons from each other about tolerance and open-mindedness. But Perrotta has something different in mind, something that doesn't cut as deeply as he must have hoped it would, even though his book does ultimately leave you satisfied.

The potency of the subject matter in The Abstinence Teacher has been undermined by inconvenient - for Perrotta, at least - real-world developments.

Last November's midterm elections, coupled with President Bush's plummeting approval ratings, have helped to dampen fears that the nation was being systematically transformed into a theocracy, that there would soon be little if any separation between church and state. (The waning influence of the Religious Right was perhaps epitomized by the revelation that megachurch leader and avowed homophobe Ted Haggard, who had just been memorably featured in the documentary Jesus Camp, had a taste for male prostitutes and crystal meth.) A recent study that showed the results of abstinence-based education were disappointing, to say the least, further hobbled the movement.

As a result, Perrotta's satire can feel curiously and even haplessly dated. (Seriously, is anyone even still talking about the evangelical men's organization Promise Keepers, besides perhaps its own members?)

What saves The Abstinence Teacher is the strength of Perrotta's deceptively simple writing. His books manage to be equally plot- and character-driven, so if the former slips up, the latter neatly compensates. He has a particular gift for writing women - recall the sociopathically driven girl Reese Witherspoon immortalized in the movie version of Election - and Ruth is elegantly rendered, a believable, and believably flawed, woman. Even the kids in the book, despite their tertiary roles, are fully formed.

The Abstinence Teacher moves at an agreeably fast clip that belies the fact that not a whole lot actually happens over the course of the story. Where it ends up is unexpected, but welcome. And with his ending, Perrotta makes fine use of the anticlimax-as- climax - something those whose beliefs he's tweaking could probably get behind.